What is Software Asset Management (SAM)?

Software Asset Management is all about effectively buying, using, managing, controlling and disposing software assets of organizations. Correctly applying a SAM strategy will cause a number of positive outcomes throughout the company’s whole life cycle. First of all your company will be able to reclaim budget and enjoy major cost savings. Secondly you will get a clear overview of all installed applications and software. Is everything up-to-date? Are you compliant? Each software product you work with has a different way to be installed and used. The license agreement should therefore be accurately followed by the end users. Software vendors regularly do software audits to see if clients are not using more software than they bought. SAM contains a lot more than just license management. However, this usually comes first when companies start with a SAM strategy. External parties can hired for SAM managed services.   

Starting with SAM too late

We see it happen all the time. Companies do not realize the value and importance of SAM and start too late, or sometimes they don’t even start at all. This is very unfortunate because a good SAM strategy is really worth the effort. Step one is to choose the SAM tools that match best with your company. It is vital to understand in this step in the process that there is not one magical tool or set of tools that will take all your problems away. Rather, there are aspects that need to be taken into consideration in the selection process such as size and complexity of the organization, the way the inventory tool is licensed, any future possible growth, how easy your employees can understand the tools and the compatibility with the current environment.   

Being over licensed

Another thing that we see happening with companies a lot is that they are over licensed. This means that they have purchased and are using more software licenses than are actually needed. On top of this they keep paying for these ongoing maintenance costs that are not even essential. The motto they have is: rather safe than sorry. But by doing this, they don’t realize that they end up having even higher costs in the end, than they would by failing an audit. So actually, the costs of being over licensed exceed the costs of paying the audit fine. Of course the best way to go is to avoid all of these unnecessary costs and to organize a great set of SAM tools and manage everything accordingly. There is absolutely no need to be overspending on these kind of costs.